0.7 21st century technology, digital displacement, and the role of  (Page 14/17)

Nanobionics: plant biology and nanotechnology

New fields of inquiry based on Nanotechnology emerge regularly today. One of these is “Nanobionics.” Researchers at MIT in Cambridge, Mass have imbedded carbon nanotubes in chloroplasts , that part of a plant’s cell where photosynthesis takes place. Some of the altered plants showed an increase in photosynthetic activity of 30%. Other altered plants were able to detect small traces of pollutants in the air. Nanobionics will very likely lead to wholly new departures in the study and applications of plant biology.

Wet nanotechnology: a nanoparticle trojan horse

We noted that nanorockets are one approach to problem of debilitating side effects of very high doses in cancer chemotherapy where the drugs are as toxic to healthy cells as well as cancer cells. Another is a nanoparticle developed at Caltech ( Science , Oct. 15, 2010) that effectively tricks tumor cells into allowing toxins to penetrate cell walls and only then release the cancer toxins to kill the cancer. The nanoparticles are doped with a drug toxic to cancer (paclitaxel) and used to ferry the toxin to the cancer cell. Nanoparticles are able to accomplish this, because they can be designed to optimize multiple functions:

• To destroy cancer cells
• Be soluble in water in order be transported by the circulatory system
• Able to target the tumor cells and neutralize the cancer cell’s defenses
• Shield normal cells from the toxin being delivered

This treatment is in the middle of clinical trials, and is but one of almost a dozen clinical trials of nanoparticle drugs in the U.S., while more than 50 companies are developing nanoparticle-based drugs to diagnose and treat cancer. ( Science , Oct, 2010).

Other innovations arising from wet nanotechnology include nanocoatings called Anhydide to de-icing agents, with obvious application in operations of airlines.

The biotechnology-information technology interface

Increasingly scientific terminology from computer science is entering the vocabulary of life scientists. And, research on computers made from biological components is now well advanced. This is understandable, since in their own ways, biological cells display computational and communicative attributes. Instead of software, we might call this the “wetware” of molecular biology. In any case, it is clear that biology is increasingly becoming an information science. Both fields deal with information processing. In the case of IT, the information is electronic. In the case of biology, biochemical information is processed. Decoding the human genome would have been impossible without the advanced computational technology now at our disposal. You might visualize your genes as your own customized software, containing recipes, or codes, for complex proteins that tell the cells in your body what to do, and how and when to do it.

And consider the amazing properties of the human chromosome. Each cell contains in the cell nucleus 46 strands of the double helix. If the strands in just one cell nucleus could be uncoiled, they would together measure 1.8 meters. A truly massive amount of information can be encoded along this length. The human genome project revealed at least 30 thousand genes and at least 300,000 proteins. The recently concluded ENCODE project, discussed below, reveals much more. To more fully understand how all these genes work together requires computing capacity for beyond what was thought possible even a decade ago. The rapid increase in the speed, and the extraordinary fall in costs of analyzing genomic data has made mathematical, statistical and computer methods the handmaiden of advances in biomedical research, diagnosis and therapy. And when quantum computing becomes cost-effective, the implications for biotechnology could open up heretofore unknown horizons.